Read on for her thoughts about science, how it works in a graphic novel format, and more!

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A Q&A with Alison Wilgus

Author of Flying Machines: How the Wright Brothers SoaredMay 2017, First Second

Q: Why is science awesome?

Alison:

​It’s exciting to learn about WHY the world works as it does! Not just memorizing facts but really digging down into the details. We all know that water falls as snow when it’s cold out, but WHY snow instead of just a little ball of ice? Why are snowflakes shaped the way they are? Why does water become solid when the temperature drops low enough? What’s it MEAN for something to be a solid rather than a liquid? And why does snow fall in the first place, instead of staying in the sky? There’s no end to the questions you can ask about every single thing, and I LOVE that!

Alison:

​One big advantage of nonfiction comics is that you can include so much information without it overwhelming your reader. You can read a page very quickly, skim over the word balloons and glance at the art, to get a general idea of what you’re talking about. Or you can look very closely at each panel and take note of all the information that’s packed into the art itself, or read side captions that offer extra information, or sit and think about the diagrams to make sure they understand all the concepts involved. A comics reader controls their own pace through the book, and can easily jump around a page to follow their own curiosity. You can take as much time as you need with the parts of the book you’re most interested in, or find the most difficult to get your head around.

Q: How did you do research to make your book?

Alison:

Originally this book was going to focus more exclusively on the Wright brothers, so to start I read several biographies of Wilbur and Orville Wright to get a sense of their lives and their work. Those books also featured many of the Wrights’ contemporaries and competitors in aviation, which gave me a list of other historical figures and aircraft to investigate. I had a few weeks where I would just go set up camp at New York’s Science, Industry and Business Library every day with a big stack of rare books, chasing down details of early flying machines and the people who designed and built them.

Q: Tell us a little about the process of creating your book!

Alison:

I have no professional background in science or history, and knew very little about aviation history and the physics of flight when I started. So my first big task was to learn as much as I could — read tons of books and articles so that I understood the big picture. Then I tried to condense as much of what I’d learned as I could into an outline, which was inevitably much too long and complicated for a 100 page graphic novel. When I sat down to write the script, my big task was to pare this big huge exciting mess down into something that would work in the number of pages we had, and which would feel like a story instead of just rapid-fire facts and names and dates. The biggest shift in the path of the script was a meeting with my editors where they suggested a narrator character might help tie the book together — I immediately thought of Katharine, Wilbur and Orville’s younger sister! This added another big stack of reading to my research — I read hundreds of Katharine’s letters to her family, to get a sense of her personality and her voice — but I’m so glad I did it. Katharine’s running commentary was my favorite part of the script to write!

Q: What's the coolest thing you learned while you were researching your book?

Alison:

​I learned all kinds of fun bits of science and history that didn’t make it into the final book. One of my favorites involved the first flight of a hydrogen balloon, created by Jacques Alexandre César Charles in 1783 with the help of Ainé and Cadet Robert. They filled the balloon by hooking it up to a oak barrel filled with iron filings — when sulfuric acid was poured over the filings, the reaction created hydrogen gas in big unpredictable belches. It also produced a LOT of heat, so much that they had to continuously spray the bottom of the balloon with water to keep it from catching fire. The whole process was messy and haphazard — they had no idea what they were doing, and how could they? It hadn’t been done before!

Q: What's the toughest part of turning science research into a comic?

Alison:

Q: Have you always loved science since you were a kid?

Alison:

​Absolutely. I was a very curious kid, and my favorite shows all focused on what we’d now call STEM — Square One Television, 321 Contact, Mr. Wizard’s World when I was little, and later Bill Nye The Science Guy and Beakman’s World. I particularly loved theoretical physics, and would pore over books about wormholes and spacetime and string theory.

Q: What do you recommend for kids who want to learn more about science and do more science?

Alison:

​Keep digging! If something’s interesting to you, don’t just look it up on Wikipedia or watch a couple videos on YouTube — get a big book on that topic out from the library, talk to librarians and to your teachers at school, visit museums and ask lots of questions. There’s so much knowledge out there, and so many people who would love to help you understand the tricky bits. Books like Flying Machines are a great way to learn the basics of a topic, but if there’s something that really catches your imagination, chase that curiosity!

For more information on the tour, check out the Macmillan link featuring all the blogs participating!

About the author:

Alison Wilgus is a Brooklyn-based writer for comics and animation, and co-author of the bestselling graphic novel "The Last Airbender: Zuko's Story."​